There's good news and bad news in the results of the Louisiana gubernatorial run-off on November 16. The good news, of course, is that the voters of the state soundly rejected the Republican ex-Nazi and Klan leader David Duke as a candidate for governor. The political hurricane warning has passed, and a sort of quasi-sanity can return.
The bad news is equally obvious. David Duke did carry a majority of the white vote in Louisiana. He did gain the national media platform he so desperately sought. And, like one of those slasher-movie villains, Duke will no doubt return, perhaps in the upcoming Republican presidential primaries.
The very fact that a totalitarian extremist such as Duke has come this far is certainly cause for alarm. But even more, it should be the cause for hard thinking about what this bizarre phenomenon can teach us about the increasingly strange, and strained, state of our nation.
First of all, let's make one thing perfectly clear. David Duke is not just a former Nazi. He may have severed his organizational ties to the Far Right and dropped most of his blatantly obvious racist and anti-Semitic terminology. But he is still a fascist, in the full historical and ideological sense of that term. He espouses a philosophy that prizes order and racial identity over freedom and cultural tolerance, and he seeks the power of the state to enforce those prejudices by any means necessary.
In the late 1980s, as he contemplated electoral office, Duke went to a plastic surgeon and had his face Aryanized with a nose and chin job. He has tried to do the same with his ideology. But he is still just a fascist with a facelift.
Duke claims his flirtations with fascism were youthful folly canceled by a later Christian rebirth. But in 1986, at the age of 35, Duke was interviewed by Evelyn Rich, a graduate student researching the Klan. Among other things, he told Rich, "We don't want Negroes around. We don't need Negroes around....We simply want our own country and our own society." He also said that the American economy is dominated by "...Jews, Jews, Jews, and more Jews. They raped the country economically....I don't have any hatred toward the average Jew. I think I've got a lot of enmity towards the Jews as a whole. I resent what they're doing. I resent them."
In 1988 Duke ran for president, first in the Democratic primaries and in the fall on the ticket of the neo-Nazi Populist Party. His campaign manager that year was a minister from the anti-Semitic Christian Identity movement. In 1989 Duke snuck into the Louisiana state legislature by 227 votes in an off-season special election. Later that year he was discovered to be selling Nazi books and tapes out of his legislative office. This was only two years ago. Duke has yet to issue any moral repudiation of his past associations, and his past associates still populate the inner circle of Duke advisers.
OF COURSE THE vast majority of Duke supporters in Louisiana are not Nazi sympathizers. Most of them simply want to support him so badly that they choose to believe Duke's skimpy and halfhearted claims of repentance. The reasons why they want to believe the man are rooted both in Louisiana peculiarities and in national realities.
To start with the local, Louisiana has a truly eccentric electoral system in which candidates of both, any, or no political party all run together in the same non-partisan primary. Then the top two vote getters, regardless of party, square off in a final runoff. This system is tailor-made for a free-floating maverick, of any stripe, who can exploit an incendiary issue and excite an intense following. If Louisiana had a system like every other state, David Duke would be buried in the party primaries and never heard from again.
In addition to the peculiarities of the electoral system, Duke also benefits from a tragic paucity of mainstream political leadership in the state. Louisiana voters are right to feel that they had no authentic choice in this year's election. Despite earlier positive accomplishments, Edwards is now most remembered for the days in the mid-1980s when, with his administration sunk in a bog of corruption, he ineffectually fiddled while the oil bust obliterated the Louisiana economy. Buddy Roemer was elected to replace Edwards, and he quickly earned a reputation for inconsistency, unreliability, and prickly egotism, all perfectly symbolized by his sudden flip-flop last year from the Democratic Party to the Republican.
In brief, many Louisiana voters felt personally betrayed by and angry at the two leading mainstream personalities in the race. Given those options, some people who should have known better probably turned to Duke as a misbegotten protest vote.
But there are other betrayals and other angers at work in the Duke phenomenon which signify far beyond the borders of Louisiana. Louisiana is in an economic depression and has been since the early 1980s. The Reagan recovery never visited here, but the Bush recession has and things are continuing to get worse. In addition, the oil-and-chemical industry, which promised Louisianans a future of endless progress and prosperity, is now revealed to have poisoned the state's land and water and a significant portion of its people.
The traditional two-party political options for dealing with hard times and disillusionment (symbolized by Edwards and Roemer) have been tried here and have failed. Now comes a (recently retired) White Knight on a metaphorical white horse who promises the white majority that the answers to their problems are easy. They don't have to pull together with their neighbors and do the hard work of forcing big business to take people's lives and communities into account. No, Duke tells them, all they have to do is go back to punishing "those people," who they never really liked very much anyhow, because "those people" are the ones who are responsible for the mess we're in.
IN THE NEWLY euphemized lexicon of the post-Nazi Duke, "those people" are "the rising welfare underclass." He claims that, through the subsidized breeding of the welfare system and the unfair special privileges of affirmative action, "those people" are eating up the resources, and taking away the jobs, which are the white man's rightful legacy.
This, of course, is the historic fascist appeal. And at most times in our history most Americans have felt secure enough to laugh it off. But faced with a poisoned economy, a poisoned environment, and a poisoned political process, we shouldn't be surprised that some working- and middle-class white people will become susceptible to the poison of racialist solutions. Our white people are, after all, no smarter or more enlightened than were the Germans of the late 1920s and early '30s.
Duke is the first and most extreme case of a new fascism making mainstream inroads. But if no genuine progressive alternative emerges by the end of this century, he may not be the last. After all, Louisiana's economic and ecological problems are not different in kind from the rest of America's; they are only further advanced. National analyses of the Duke phenomenon have made much of the fact that his appeal has broadened beyond the traditional low-income, white, working-class constituency usually mined by racist extremists to include significant numbers of the "middle class." This is true. But most pundits fail to see that this is only symptomatic of the fact that the "middle class" in America is sliding back toward relative poverty and disenfranchisement. And it will not go quietly.
Finally, the field for Duke's fascism was fertilized by 10 years of Republican rule in the White House. In 1980, at the beginning of his presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan traveled to Neshoba County, Mississippi, where the three civil rights workers were killed in 1964. But Reagan didn't come to Mississippi to deliver praise for the transformed and integrated New South. Instead Reagan delivered a speech calling for a return to "states' rights." States' rights was, of course, the code word of the Southern segregationists in the 1950s and '60s. From that day forward the signal went out loud and clear, and not just to the South, that racial discrimination, and outright racism, were again tolerated components of American culture.
Of course, George Bush amplified that signal in 1988 with the infamous Willie Horton campaign. This year Bush has shown every sign of preparing to steal the thunder of old-time segregationist Jesse Helms by campaigning on a code-worded platform of "Quota! Quota! Quota!"--which translates, "Willie Horton is coming to take your job." At this writing Bush is rushing to get his name onto a civil rights bill in order to distance himself from David Duke Republicanism. But the fruit never falls far from the tree. As Duke himself says, "I agree with most of the things that President Bush does."
If we are serious about expunging racism, at least from American public life, we will have to start simultaneously at the bottom and the top. At the top we need clear signals from political, religious, and cultural leaders that racism is un-American, un-Christian, and unacceptable. At the bottom we need a genuine attempt to understand the forces that lead frightened and insecure white people into the racist trap, and a new politics that can unite people of all races around what are, for the most part, shared grievances and aspirations.
Danny Duncan Collum is a contributing editor of Sojourners.
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